Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples

A Neat Window, Santa Monica was taken in 1967-68 when David Hockney and his lover Peter Schlesinger rented a tiny historic penthouse on 3rd Street in Santa Monica. There, they befriended their neighbours, novelist Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy. A Neat Window, Santa Monica provi🍸des a glimpse into Isherwood and Bachardy’s cozy home. The shutters shown here are also a compositional element in Hockney’s 1968 painting, .

Hockney’s first used his photographic images as references for paintings, and by early 1982, the photographs he had taken filled roughly 120 albums.  To Hockney, these were merely 'scrap-books of travel memories plus ideas for paintings, nothing more than that' (David Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, p. 201).  In 1976, Ileana Sonnabend showed Twenty Photographic Pictures at Sonnabend ꦚGallery, marking the first time any of Hocꦬkney’s photographs were ever shown in a gallery setting. Following Hockney’s debut  at Sonnabend, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris both presented exhibitions of Hockney’s photographs.